As we approach the 2026 General Assembly and election season, we have yet another example of Kentucky Republican officials and/or candidates behaving badly.

A few weeks ago, there was Calvin Leach running for state Senate after once writing online that young women are “promiscuous skanks,” “coddled americunts,” “party whores” and “damn sloots” (internet slang for slut).

When asked about this, Leach described his writing as dating advice, saying that diversity, equity, and inclusion has gotten out of hand.

Now we have state representative T.J. Roberts responding to a female citizen’s email with an AI-generated video of himself, superimposed over Trump, as the president said to a female reporter, “quiet, piggy.” 

Roberts stated that his response fit the tone of the woman’s initial email, writing, “The leftist activist posing as a PR specialist sent me a joke of an email, attacking law and order and our law enforcement community, so I sent a joke of a response.” He also posted the video on social media.

A citizen had questions. In what way was her email a joke? 

And yet, Roberts has a history of posting what he seemingly considers “jokes” on social media in which he demeans women. 

I know, because I am one of them.

In summer 2023, Roberts posted four photos of firearms on Twitter/X and wrote, “Kentucky ‘journalist’ Teri Carter has to be the biggest Karen in Kentucky. Show off your guns and make her mad.” Days earlier he’d posted three photos of firearms with “Make a gun grabbing ‘journalist’ mad. Post black and scary guns.”

Notably, summer 2023 followed the horrific mass shooting at Old National Bank in Louisville in which a mentally unstable 25-year-old walked into a store, legally purchased a firearm and ammunition, and days later shot five people to death – Thomas Elliott, James Tutt Jr., Juliana Farmer, Joshua Barrick, Deana Eckert – and injured eight. 

A few days after Old National Bank, David Huff and Deaji Goodman were killed and four others injured when someone shot into a crowd in Louisville’s Chickasaw Park. 

I wrote about both incidents, which appeared to trigger Roberts, whom I have never met nor spoken with. 

Are mass shootings a joke?

A year later, over Fourth of July weekend 2024, there was a mass shooting at a 21st birthday party in Florence (northern Kentucky, Boone County) in which four people were shot to death and three were recovering, including a 19-year-old girl. According to news reports, the 21-year-old shooter was on probation with a criminal history that included sexual assault of a 13-year-old.

After I wrote about this incident and mentioned Mr. Roberts’ prior social media statements (as listed above), he posted a photo of an AR-15 on Twitter/X and wrote, “Every time a leftist posing as a ‘journalist’ runs a hit piece on me for my total commitment to your constitutional rights, including your right to bear arms, I will buy a new gun and name it after the fake journalist. Meet Teri.”

On July 21 this year, following a church shooting, I emailed senate president Robert Stivers, president pro tempore David Givens, house speaker David Osborne, and speaker pro tempore David Meade after Roberts posted a pie chart titled “Reasons I own a gun,” above which he wrote “FAFO” which stands for “f*** around and find out.” 

I wrote to them that “Mr. Roberts posted this (see attached below) on his Twitter/X account just days after the shooting of a state trooper and a shooting in a church. Is there no respect for the community? For survivors? For law enforcement? For the victims?”

I did not receive a response.

As a female writer in the internet age, I am used to ignoring internet trolls. But Roberts’ posts display a disturbing pattern of behavior, and regular citizens — like the woman who wrote to him of her concerns about a bill he has proposed for 2026 — deserve better than to be publicly mocked by a state representative saying “quiet piggy.”

Is this conduct befitting a member of our general assembly? Of the Kentucky Republican party? 

It seems the answer is yes.

Recently Bobbie Coleman, chairperson of the Hardin County Republican Party, made national news after she posted an AI video on the county party’s Facebook page with former President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama portrayed as grinning apes. 

Kentucky GOP Chairman Robert J. Benvenuti III called Coleman’s video “vile and reprehensible” and said the party would take “the harshest action available” against those involved. 

That was a month ago. Where is this alleged “harshest action”? 

Based on experience, I suggest we not hold our breath.

I do not know what has befallen the Republican Party of Kentucky, nor what has fueled senate and house leadership’s continuing tolerance of such unprofessional and embarrassing behavior within their ranks.

What I do know is that this behavior is not work — the work they continually insist citizens do — and that none of it provides Kentuckians with jobs, affordable housing, food, education, medical care, or public safety. 

Kentucky deserves so much better.

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Imagine no more cookie notices.

Imagine no more Internet of Nothing But Accounts.

Imagine no more surveillance panopticons.

Imagine no more privacy in the hands of everybody but you.

Imagine no more creepy adtech.

Then thank MyTerms. When the time comes. We start that clock today.

It’s not a new idea. We’ve had it since before The Cluetrain Manifesto (1999). The Buyer Centric Commerce Forum (2004). ProjectVRM (2006). The Intention Economy (2012). Customer Commons (2013). And finally, since IEEE P7012 (2017).

It’s what we got with the Internet and its founding protocols, TCP and IP (1974).

It’s what we got with the Web and with its founding protocol, HTTP (1989).

It’s what we got with dozens of other members of the Internet Protocol Suite, plus other graces, such as RSS, which we can thank every time we hear “and wherever you get your podcasts.”

All of those protocols are end-to-end, i.e. peer-to-peer, by design.

And so is MyTerms, which is the nickname for IEEE P7012 (like Wi-Fi is the nickname for IEEE 802.11.)

As of today, MyTerms has its own website: https://myterms.info.

MyTerms is a standard that the P7012 working group, which I chair, has just completed after eight years in the works. It is due to be published by the IEEE on January 22, 2026.

MyTerms describes how the sites and services of the world agree to your terms, rather than the other way around. It says your agreements with those sites and services are contracts you both agree to, rather than the empty promises that come when you click on cookie notice “choices.” These agreements are ones both sides store in ways that can be audited and disputed, should the need arise.

And the process is made simple, by limiting your chosen agreement to one among the handful kept on a roster kept by a disinterested nonprofit, such as Customer Commons., on the model established by Creative Commons.

Right now there are just five. The default one is SD-BASE, which says “service delivery only.” SD-BASE says what you get from a site or a service si what you expect when you walk into a store in the natural world: just their business, whether it be luggage, lunch, or lingerie. Not to be tracked elsewhere like a marked animal or have information about you sold or shared to other parties—which is the norm we have today in the digital world.

Other variants cover data portability, data use for AI training, data for good, and data for intentcasting.

In the natural world we worked out privacy many millenia ago. We started with the privacy tech we call clothing and shelter. Then we worked out social contracts that were almost entirely tacit, meaning we knew more about them than we could tell, but everyone understood how it worked.

But there is no tacit in the digital world. Everything there needs to be made explicit, with ones and zeroes and written into code. In the absence of explicit agreement about what privacy is, and how it works, we’re stuck with the horrible tacit understanding by business-as-usual that following people without their express invitation or a court order is just fine, and worth $trillions.

With MyTerms we can have $trillions more. Because far more business is possible when customers can have scale, and an abuncance of mutually trusted market intelligence can flow both ways moves between peers in the open marketplace.

At this stage, the collection of workers behind MyTerms is still small. If you’re interested in joining us, write to contact@myterms.info.

On November 21, the Cardano blockchain suffered a major chainsplit after someone created a transaction that exploited an old bug in Cardano node software, causing the chain to split. The person who submitted the transaction fessed up on Twitter, writing, "It started off as a 'let's see if I can reproduce the bad transaction' personal challenge and then I was dumb enough to rely on AI's instructions on how to block all traffic in/out of my Linux server without properly testing it on testnet first, and then watched in horror as the last block time on explorers froze."

Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano, responded with a tweet boasting about how quickly the chain recovered from the catastrophic split, then accused the person of acting maliciously. "It was absolutely personal", Hoskinson wrote, adding that the person's public version of events was merely him "trying to walk it back because he knows the FBI is already involved". Hoskinson added, "There was a premeditated attack from a disgruntled [single pool operator] who spent months in the Fake Fred discord actively looking at ways to harm the brand and reputation of IOG. He targeted my personal pool and it resulted in disruption of the entire cardano network."

Hoskinson's decision to involve the FBI horrified some onlookers, including one other engineer at the company who publicly quit after the incident. They wrote, "I've fucked up pen testing in a major way once. I've seen my colleagues do the same. I didn't realize there was a risk of getting raided by the authorities because of that + saying mean things on the Internet."

• Tweet thread by Homer J
• Tweet by Charles Hoskinson
• Tweet by Charles Hoskinson

I wish I were making this up: Eighty-six Democrats voted for a Republican-contrived House resolution on Friday decrying “the horrors of socialism.”

The horrors of socialism? Do you mean like Social Security, Medicare, the interstate highway system, and air-traffic control? The digging of the Erie Canal? The free museums that are part of the government’s Smithsonian Institution? Or did they get their panties in wad over land-grant colleges, public libraries, and city fire departments?

The sponsor, María Elvira Salazar, the Republican assistant whip for the House, had the vote on the same day that New York City Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani was meeting with President Trump at the White House. The vote was clearly aimed at embarrassing Mamdani and splitting the Democratic House caucus. So of course, the worst Democrats took the bait.

Eric Michael Garcia, the Washington bureau chief at the United Kingdom’s The Independent and an MSNBC regular, did God’s own work and compiled a list of these losers, which you can see here on Bluesky. Incidentally, Congressman Morgan McGarvey did not embarrass himself and is not on the list.

But you know who is? House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries! And Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar. And Democratic House Whip Katherine Clark. And, sad to say, a favorite of mine, House Democratic Vice Chair Ted Lieu. The only member of Democratic House leadership not on the loser list is Suzan DelBene, the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Bunches of committee ranking members also appear on the List of Shame, among them Angie Craig of Agriculture, Brendan Boyle of Budget, and Bennie Johnson of Homeland Security. (A “ranking member” is the most senior member of the minority party on a particular committee, the person most likely to become chair once the Democrats kick the bums out. So a pretty powerful Democrat.) Sadly, leadership in lockstep indicates this was clearly an organized Democratic tactic (a.k.a., stupidity on purpose).

And that brings us to the reason this non-binding resolution is a bigger deal than it seems. When you have the House Democratic leadership openly saying that Americans having what the citizens every other industrialized country in the world take for granted (universal health care; affordable housing, child care, and colleges; living wages; universal pre-kindergarten) is “a horror,” then we need new leadership.

Because with friends like these, Americans don’t need Republicans to make their lives worse and protect the 1% at all costs. These corporate Democrats are happy to take on the task.

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Not sure a hugely topical and well-reported piece in The New York Times needs any amplification from me but….this just in … “the Times has uncovered nearly 50 cases of people having mental health crises during conversations with ChatGPT. Nine were hospitalized; three died”

You should read their report about what went on the inside, at OpenAI.

A big part of the culprit? Maximizing metrics for user engagement.

Lots of internal warnings were ignored.

Here’s Kashmir Hill’s own summary, followed by a gift link to the essay. It’s long but with lots of new insights into how OpenAI rolls — and by extension insights what that might mean for the future of AI safety.

You can read the essay here.

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